OpenLayers

OpenLayers is probably the most flexible and popular of the open source thin web clients for web maps. There has always been a fairly comprehensive on-line reference wiki at the OpenLayers.org website, and additional examples for deploying OpenLayers have been available on third-party (enthusiast) websites.

However, there has always been a very steep learning curve for beginners. It was not until early in 2011 that a reference book for beginners was published. Erik Hazzard's book, OpenLayers 2.10 Beginner's Guide from Pakt Publishing, suffers from sloppy editing and a multitude of typos, but it filled a very real need in the open web mapping world.

This rest of this page displays some of the many other reference resources available on the web for users of OpenLayers.

A 2013 addition to the growing list of OpenLayers books was Packt's OpenLayers Starter book, which is part of their "Instant" series of brief, how-to books designed to help the reader install and get started quickly with fairly complex software packages.

This book is jointly authored by Alessio di Lorenzo and Giovanni Allegri.

The current version of OpenLayers is 3.0, and a new book is also available from Packt. The book is an update and expansion of the original OpenLayers 2.10 book introduced above.

The book, the OpenLayers 3 Beginner's Guide, again features author Erik Hazzard, but also introduces two more authors, Thomas Gratier and Paul Spencer.

These books shown thus far have been produced by a commercial publisher, Packt Publishing, that publishes numerous books on open source software of various types. The books are published in printed form as well as in electronic form.

One of the new movements recently is to publish exclusively in the e-book world, foregoing the printed versions of books in favor of electronic books in formats such as PDF, mobi, epub, and a few others. A publisher that specializes in such publications is Leanpub, which also seems to publish many e-books on open source products.

The Farkas book lays out the basics of web mapping using OpenLayers, and later chapters introduce incorporation of open source JavaScript frameworks in these web maps

With the introduction of OpenLayers version 3, and the publication of a stable of reference books, the on-line repertoire of tutorials and resources also continues to grow. Some of them are listed in the tables below.

On-Line OpenLayers User Forums

This document was originally published in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the MGIS degree by Howard Yamaguchi, enrolled at that time in the MGIS program of The Pennsylvania State University (graduated December 2011). Additional information is being placed in this website from time to time, as are edits to existing content. Website content management by Google™ Sites.